Preface

This is the preface sheet to Kitao Masanobu's celebrated album New Yoshiwara Beauties Compared with Their Own Calligraphy (Yoshiwara keisei shin bijin awase jihitsu kagami), published 1783-1784. Unlike the double portraits that follow, the preface page is dominated by text rather than by figures, and it sets out the album's premise: that the album will present the leading courtesans of the Yoshiwara two by two, with each woman identified by name, by house, and by a sample of her own brush. Masanobu was both designer and, under his other name Santō Kyōden, a working writer, and the literary framing of the project — the appeal to authenticity through reproduced calligraphy — is very much in his manner. The preface is typeset and printed in the same careful, tonally restrained way as the rest of the album, with seal cartouches and decorative borders that establish the book's status as a luxury production rather than as a cheap single-sheet [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The MAK in Vienna holds the sheet as part of one of the most complete surviving copies of an album whose other sheets, depicting Hanaōgi, Tagasode, Hitomoto, and the rest of the Yoshiwara's most prominent women, would become defining images of late-eighteenth-century Edo bijin-ga.